MATERIAL MATTERS

412 MRS BULLETIN VOLUME 30 JUNE 2005

Recently, I watched a humorous news
segment on CNN about the U.S. election,
specifically about the Blue States and Red
States. In this piece, CNN correspondent
Jeanne Moos was touring New York City,
interviewing people in downtown
Manhattan. Many of them felt rather dis-
enfranchised from the rest of the country,
while some actually felt much more affini-
ty for Canada than for what the United
States seems to have become for them.
After the interviews, up popped this map
of the North American continent, with all
the Blue States in blue, all the Red States in
red, and all of Canada in blue. Written
across the top of Canada was The United
States of Canada and written across the
red section of the United States, it said,
Jesusland. It was funny, of course, but it
also had a serious side. I have just finished
reading a book called The Faith of George
W. Bush by Stephen Mansfield (Strang
Communications/Penguin Group, New
York, 2003). I found it to be an excellent
book, and I recommend it for those who
want to gain some insight into why the
folks in Jesusland voted for this man, and
to learn about what motivates him.
A Charge to Keep
Relative to that, about a year ago I was
in the Oval Office, along with a number
of other people, when President Bush
signed the nanotechnology bill. Most of
us expected the event to be something
like a five-minute photo-opsign the
bill, shake hands, and leave. Instead, the
door closed and for about half an hour
the president chatted with us. So here
was my great opportunity to talk to the
president, and I could not think of a thing
to say! But something else noteworthy
happened. As Mr. Bush walked around
the Oval Office, pointing out items of
interest, he focused on a painting by
W.H.D. Koerner, titled A Charge to Keep,
and remarked that he had a personal con-
nection to this painting. The subject of the
work is a lone horseman riding western
saddle up over a difficult hill, probably
someplace out in Texas. The horseman is
actually a Methodist circuit rider, and the
whole notion is that this rider is on a mis-
sion to go out and do good work, specifi-
cally, to spread religion and belief in God
across the early Western frontier.
The more I think about that experience
and the significance of that painting, the
more I believe that the concept of mis-
sion is at the core of what really does
motivate our president. Now that we are
embarking on four more years of the Bush
administration, I have also been ponder-
ing just what implications that mission
might have for us. With a Republican
majority in both the House and the Senate,
and four years to move his agenda for-
ward, President Bush has an excellent
opportunity to make his mark on history.
Of course, I have my own concept of
what the presidents mission should be
my own list of charges to keep for this
administration. There are three core prob-
lems that I think the president ought to
address, all of which are connected with
and impinge on the major issue of energy
prosperity: inspiring the next generation of
U.S. scientists and engineers, developing
replacements for the dwindling fossil fuel
resources that have provided a majority of
our energy in the past, and finding a solu-
tion to global warming. I believe that tak-
ing on these challenges would be a deeply
moral and wise course of action.
Problem 1: Creating a
Sputnik Effect
The top charge to keep on my list for
President Bush should be to inspire the
next generation of U.S. scientists and
engineers. Currently, despite all we have
done in the past decade, we are not
spurring young Americans to go into the
physical sciences and engineering. This
problem is getting worse as the years go
by. Today, the number of U.S. citizens
getting degrees in physical science and
engineering alone is lowit is at best sta-
tic, and dropping off. My latest data is for
the year 2002 (see Figure 1); the 2003 and
2004 numbers will be a bit lower. The
number of Americans getting degrees in
all fields of sciences and engineering,
excluding psychology and social sciences
(the increase coming mostly from the life
sciences), is about a factor of two higher
but is still static and tapering off.
Another bleak indicator is the waning
influence of the United States on the scien-
tific education of students from other
countries. For a number of decades, the
United States, particularly after World War
II, was the premier place for the advance-
ment of physical science and engineering.
Now, that is no longer true. In fact, in
todays world, Europe and Asia, having
recovered from their wars, have dramati-
cally enhanced their education experience
and are strongly pushing the physical sci-
ences and engineering, along with the life
sciences. This trend has been remarkable.
Back in the early 1980s, some of the first
Asian students I had in my groupvery
bright students from Chinawere among
the first who came over during the Carter
administration. In the decades that fol-
lowed, many young Asians who received
their degrees here stayed here in the
United States. Now, however, a great
majority of bright, young, highly motivat-
ed Asian scientists are returning to their
own countries. More and more, new stu-
dents are not coming over here at all for
their education because it is not necessari-
ly true anymore that to be on the frontier
of science and engineering, to be in the
cutting-edge research groups, one has to
come to the United States. Asian citizens
now dominate new PhD production in
the sciences and engineering worldwide.
They are bright, creative, and extremely
hard-working. As current trends contin-
ue, they are the future.
So the handwriting is on the wall. We
are entering a world where the vast
majority of young Americans no longer
go into the physical sciences and engi-
neering. This is a major concern. In
October 1957, the launch of the Russian
Sputnik satellite was a wake-up call for
Future Global Energy
Prosperity: The
Terawatt Challenge
Richard E. Smalley
The following article is an edited transcript based on the Symposium XFrontiers of
Materials Research presentation given by Richard E. Smalley of Rice University on December 2,
2004, at the Materials Research Society Fall Meeting in Boston.
At some point, almost certainly
within this decade, we will peak
in the amount of oil that is
produced worldwide.
www.mrs.org/publications/bulletin
MATERIAL MATTERS
MRS BULLETIN VOLUME 30 JUNE 2005 413
the United States, pointing to a critical
gap in its space technology and sparking
a dramatic enhancement in technical and
science education programs.
My hope is that President Bush will
take up the charge of promoting careers
in scienceparticularly in the physical
sciences and engineering. Somehow, if he
can find a way, our president should try
to do today for science and engineering
what John Kennedy so effectively did in
the early 1960s with the Apollo space
program. We need a new Sputnik
Generation of scientists and engineers.
Problem 2: Peaks in Oil Production
Another charge to keep that should be at
the top of the presidents list is the assur-
ance of abundant, low-cost energy for us
and our posterity. We are used to living in
a world where energy is cheap, and most
of that energy was produced right here in
the United States. The majority of our oil
came from Texas, which was once the pre-
mier oil producer in the world and is still
the center of the worlds oil and gas busi-
nesses. Yet, as far back as 1970, we peaked
in the amount of oil we could produce in
this country. Even though we still think of
Texas as the land of people getting crazy-
rich discovering oil in their back yard, in
fact Texas has been a net importer of ener-
gy for over a decade now, with billions of
energy dollars a year going out of the state.
Saudi Arabia and the Middle East are now
the dominant oil sources. Even their oil
production, however, will eventually
decline. At some point, almost certainly
within this decade, we will peak in the
amount of oil that is produced worldwide.
Even though there will be massive
amounts of oil produced for the rest of this
century, the volume produced each year
will never again reach the amount pro-
duced at its peak. This year, 2005, might
very well end up being the historic date of
that global peak.
Oil, along with gas, is tremendously
important. The history of oil is basically
the history of modern civilization as we
have known it for the past 100 years. As
our principal transportation fuel, oil has
been the basis of our countrys power
and prosperity. What will we do when
there is no longer enough oil and gas?
We do not yet have an answer.
Problem 3: Dealing with
Atmospheric CO
2
The third charge to keep is care of the
environment for the century to come.
Confounding the energy challenge just
described is the problem of global warm-
ing. For decades now, the average surface
temperature of the earth has been going
up. During this same time, the CO
2
level in
the atmosphere has also been increasing
(see Figure 2). The sharp upswing in tem-
perature and CO
2
levels during th e 20th
century corresponds with the rise of fossil
fuels as the worlds primary energy source
and the vast increase in global population.
It might turn out that there is no causal
connection between CO
2
and the warm-
ing of the earththat if we wait long
enough we will see this warming trend
go back down, even though CO
2
levels
keep going up. On the other hand, most
likely there is a causal connection. Even if
you were a conservative businessperson,
you would probably agree that if a vice
president of your corporation told you
that there is no need to worry about CO
2
in the atmosphere, you would consider
that too risky a belief on which to base
the future of your companylet alone
the future of the world.
Whatever ones viewpoint, we need to
find an answer to this problem. What bet-
ter time to take on these issues than now,
with the great resources available in
President Bushs second term. What bet-
ter time to challenge American young
peopleand for that matter, the rest of
the worldto find ways to solve this
global conundrum?
Energy Heads Top Ten
Global Concerns
Energy is not just any old issue. Most
people, in fact, understand its importance
very well. When I have given talks on
this subject before, I have often asked
people in the audience to name the most
critical problems we will have to confront
as we go through this century. In every
case, after a bit of discussion, the audi-
ences have agreed that energy is the sin-
gle most important issue we face.
Why is energy always preeminent?
When we look at a prioritized list of the
Figure 2. Global warming over the past millennium, by temperature
and CO
2
level. (a) Data from thermometers (red) and from tree rings,
corals, ice cores, and historical records (blue); (b) data from mea-
surements at Mauna Loa Observatory: Hawaii (red) and ice core
records (blue). Courtesy of Marty Hoffert of New York University.
Figure 1. Earned doctoral degrees in science and engineering.
Extracted from Science and Engineering Indicators 2, National
Science Board (NSB 04-01), 2004, www.nsf.gov/nsb/documents/
reports.htm (accessed April 2005).
MATERIAL MATTERS
414 MRS BULLETIN VOLUME 30 JUNE 2005
top 10 problems, with energy at the top,
we can see how energy is the key to solv-
ing all of the rest of the problemsfrom
water to population:
1. Energy
2. Water
3. Food
4. Environment
5. Poverty
6. Terrorism and war
7. Disease
8. Education
9. Democracy
10. Population
Take the second problem on the list, for
example: water. Already billions of peo-
ple around our planet live without reli-
able access to clean water for drinking
and agriculture. As population continues
to build and the depletion of existing
aquifers worsens, we will need to find
vast new sources of clean water. Luckily,
our planet has huge resources of water,
but most has salt in it, and it is often
thousands of miles away from where we
need it. We can solve this problem with
energy: desalinate the water and pump it
vast distances. But without cheap energy,
there is no acceptable answer.
Without abundant fresh water, how
are we going to provide the food for our
burgeoning worldwide population?
Without cheap energy, how are we going
to produce the fertilizer, till the soil, har-
vest the crops, process them, package
them, and deliver them to markets?
Energy likewise plays the dominant role
in determining the quality of our environ-
ment, the prevention of disease, and so on,
down the entire list of global concerns.
In short, energy is the single most
important factor that impacts the prosper-
ity of any society. In todays world, with
about six and a half billion people, only
about one and a half billion of us enjoy
modern energy at the level to which we in
this audience are accustomed. It is impos-
sible to imagine bringing the lower half of
the economic ladder of human civiliza-
tionabout three billion peopleup to a
modern lifestyle without abundant, low-
cost, clean energy.
Right now, we do not have the technol-
ogy to enable that. If we do not solve the
energy problem for these billions of peo-
ple who are basically disenfranchised,
how can we imagine that we are going to
avoid a future that has ongoing war and
terrorism at levels that exceed what we
have already known in this past unprece-
dentedly violent 20th century, a century
in which we had less than half the popu-
lation we have now, a century that was
blessed with ever-abundant cheap oil?
Continuing down the list of problems,
we can make strong arguments that energy
would be tremendously enabling in solv-
ing all of these issues, even population. The
good news about population is that around
the planet, the fertility rate is dropping.
Whenever a nation begins to develop, the
fertility rate generally drops. In fact, in
many sections of the developed world, fer-
tility rates are now so low that we need to
increase them. During our lifetime, we will
see worldwide population growth continue
to slow down, then level out at somewhere
around 10 billion people. It probably will
not go higher than that. Our challenge then
is to make it possible for 10 billion people to
live a reasonable lifestyle on this planet.
That is certainly our charge to keep.
The Terawatt Challenge
To provide the technology for accom-
plishing our energy goals, what we need
to do is to find the new oila basis for
energy prosperity in the 21st century that
is as enabling as oil and gas have been for
the past century. The sheer magnitude of
the energy industry makes this an ex-
tremely difficult task. Studying the prob-
lem in depth, we come to appreciate the
fundamental nature of the scientific break-
throughs necessary to activate these new
energy sources.
In 2004, we consumed on average the
equivalent of 220 million barrels of oil per
day to run the world. Or, if we convert
that into watts, what ran the world was
about 14.5 terawatts. The vast majority of
this energy was from oil, gas, and coal.
Fission and biomass were significant play-
ers. Most of this biomass was the energy
source for the bottom half of the global
economic ladder, three billion people or
so. A great deal of that was unsustainably
burned vegetation, cow dung, and other
materials that are used where modern
energy is not available or affordable. Quite
a bit of the 14.5 terawatts was hydropow-
er, but we have already tapped most of
the available hydropower. An incredibly
small amount of that energy, about 0.5%,
was solar, wind, and geothermal, with
geothermal composing the largest part.
To solve the energy challenge, we will
have to find a way to produce, every day,
not just what we are producing right now,
but at least twice that much. We will need
to increase our energy output by a mini-
mum factor of two, the generally agreed-
upon number, certainly by the middle of
the century, but preferably well before
thatdespite the fact that oil and gas will
have long since peaked. Considering that
many people on the planet are not using
much energy at all and that new energy
sources have yet to be developed, billions
of people would still be living without
modern energy. To give all 10 billion peo-
ple on the planet the level of energy pros-
perity we in the developed world are used
to, a couple of kilowatt-hours per person,
we would need to generate 60 terawatts
around the planetthe equivalent of 900
million barrels of oil per day.
Where could that amount of energy
ever come from? The goal of finding it
seems impossible. Nevertheless, we need
to acquire the ability to produce energy at
this magnitude in a sustainable, continual
way and do it at a low-enough costa
couple of pennies per kilowatt-hourto
enable global prosperity.
Searching for the enormous amounts
of energy that could accomplish this goal,
we find, remarkably, that our biggest
resources are in the areas where we gen-
erate hardly any energy at all right
nowsolar, wind, and geothermal.
Reversing Current Energy Trends
By 2050, if we have solved the prob-
lem, the worlds energy breakdown will
probably look like a reverse of what it is
today. Oil, hydroelectric, coal, and gas (in
that order) would supply the least
amount of energy, with fusion/fission
and biomass processes being somewhat
larger players, and solar/wind/geother-
mal resources providing the majority of
the worlds energy. This new breakdown
represents a revolution in the largest
enterprise of humankind, an energy
industry that currently runs about $3 tril-
lion per year.
Getting there will be incredibly difficult.
If we knew today how to transform the
makeup of our energy mix by exploiting
fission/fusion, solar, or wind, it would
take an inordinate amount of time. If I
could go out tomorrow and turn on the
switch of a new power plant that would
produce a thousand megawatts of power
from some new, clean, carbon-free energy
source, I would have to turn on a new
plant every day for 27 years before I gen-
erated even 10 terawatts of new power.
To give all 10 billion people on
the planet the level of energy
prosperity we in the developed
world are used to, a couple of
kilowatt-hours per person, we
would need to generate 60
terawatts around the planet
the equivalent of 900 million
barrels of oil per day.
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MRS BULLETIN VOLUME 30 JUNE 2005 415
Ten terawatts plus 14 terawatts does not
add up to even half of the 60 terawatts we
will eventually need. Of course, we do not
currently have the technology to build a
fleet of nuclear fission breeder reactors
let alone a solar or geothermal plantthat
could produce that amount of energy
cheaply. I believe that if we do not find a
way to build such power plants over the
next decade, or at most two, this 21st cen-
tury is going to be very unpleasant.
Finding Alternatives to Oil
Where are we going to find new energy?
The list of possible sources will not pro-
duce enough of an energy impact. True,
early on we could achieve some progress
with conservation and efficiency. In the
developed world, with its top billion peo-
ple, it is possible that we could effect sub-
stantial energy savings. In the undevel-
oped world, however, conservation is
meaningless, because so little energy is
used. Even with high efficiency, then, we
are still going to need vast new energy
sources. Hydroelectric, as I mentioned, is
mostly tapped out. Biomass could be very
significant were we not confronted with a
global food and water crisis. Essentially,
we are trying to move from a situation
where we pull our energy out of the
ground in oil and gas to one where we
must grow energy crops every year at a
very high rate in order to produce just one
terawatt. This would require a revolution
in agriculture at a time when we are strug-
gling just to sustain our current production
levels for food.
There has been a lot of talk about the
hydrogen economy, which I believe is,
despite its virtues, likely to remain a dis-
traction from the real, practical solutions
to our energy needs. Hydrogen is not a
basic energy source. Rather, hydrogen is
a way of storing energy and moving it
from here to there. Unfortunately, it does
not do either of these tasks very well. For
these tasks, electricity is a much better
answer. Electrical power transmission is
a superb way to move energy from one
place to another, and at least on a small
scale, electrical power can be stored.
The biggest resources right now are in
fossil fuelsoil, gas, and coal. We cer-
tainly have enough coal for another five
decades or so, if we expand production.
But we cannot simply burn all that coal
and assume that the CO
2
problem is
going to go away, or that we can ignore
it, or get around it. The only way now
imagined to deal with the enormity of
this issue is sequestration, finding places
where CO
2
can be securely stored. Given
that the average lifetime of CO
2
in the
atmosphere is greater than 100 years, we
would need to store it so that much less
than 1% escapes from the ground every
year. We could certainly build such stor-
age facilities in special locations for small
amounts of CO
2
, but to solve the problem
for the planet, we would need to build
them all over the world and be able to
verify that they will safely store tens of
gigatons of carbon per year, and do this
year after year. There is no known way to
do this. Putting CO
2
in the ground does
not generate any money; instead, it is
more like taking money and throwing it
down a hole. I have yet to hear a com-
pelling business case for sequestration.
Solar Solutions
I do not believe that our energy prob-
lems can be solved through the burning
of fossil fuels. Yet, these fuels currently
represent our primary energy resources,
the only ones we know how to use to our
economic advantage. The energy sources
that could genuinely respond to our
future needs are all basically from
nuclear sources, either human-made
nuclear fission or nuclear fusion reactors,
or the nuclear reactions resulting from
the spontaneous decay of uranium and
thorium in the rocks of the earth (geo-
thermal energy). Then there is that great
big hydrogen fusion reactor up in the
sky, the sun. That is where the truly big
resources can be found.
Yet, the mention of solar energy in
any kind of conversation about world
energy will sometimes elicit a wry smile
from certain peoplefor example, from
some people in my home town of
Houston, where the favorite unit of ener-
gy is the barrel of oil. By saying solar
energy, we show that we know nothing
about how big the energy industry is, or
what the real energy people are doing.
Solar is not now a major player in
worldwide energy. To those people with
wry smiles, however, I would like to
point out that if they like nuclear reactors
as a big-time, big-boy energy solution,
they should be impressed by a nuclear
reactor that has been going strong for bil-
lions of years. Without doing anything,
we enjoy the effect of 165,000 terawatts of
power hitting the earths disk every
moment of every day. This vast nuclear
reactor has gone through over 4 billion
years of shake-down trials, and it is prob-
ably going to continue providing stable
performance for at least another couple
of billion years. We are bathed in energy.
The truth is that there is plenty of ener-
gy hitting the surface of the earth. Nate
Lewis of the California Institute of Tech-
nology likes to demonstrate that we could
cleanly meet the worlds entire energy
needs, two kilowatts per person for 10 bil-
lion people, by applying the following ele-
gant solution (shown in Figure 3). On a
global map, identify six rectangular spaces
located in areas of high solar radiation,
create 10% efficiency, then collect that
power, which would be about 20 ter-
awatts of electrical power, the equivalent
of 60 terawatts total energy power at a
30% energy conversion. That would total-
ly solve humanitys energy problem and
ASIA AND RUSSIA
AFRICA
SOUTH
AMERICA
NORTH
AMERICA
EUROPE
AUSTRALIA
AND OCEANIA
Figure 3. Solar cell land area requirements in which the six boxes (100 km on a side), located in
areas of high solar radiation, can each provide 3.3 terawatts of electrical power to a total of ~20
terawatts of electrical power. Courtesy of Nate Lewis of the California Institute of Technology.
MATERIAL MATTERS
416 MRS BULLETIN VOLUME 30 JUNE 2005
allow us to concentrate on other problems
for the rest of this century.
Although there is plenty of solar ener-
gy, we do not have the technology to
develop it at a few pennies per kilowatt-
hour. Right now we could do it at about
2050 cents a kilowatt-hour (averaged
over a day/night cycle), but that would
be far too expensive. If you believe with
me that we absolutely need to provide
the planets 10 billion people with the
potential to pursue a fulfilling lifestyle,
where they have a roof over their heads,
enough food to eat, sufficient mobility,
communications, and the capability to
build homes and develop cities, then you
will agree that we have to revolutionize
the worlds energy system. We need
cheap, clean energy in vast amounts.
The Distributed Energy Grid
The hardest problem will be finding
viable replacements for the energy
sources we have been relying on for
decades, oil in particular. Oil is not only a
great primary energy source, it is also the
best form in which to transport energy
over continental distances and across
oceans. Most of the oil we import comes
across the sea in what has become a very
efficient processputting the oil in
tankers. When we buy a gallon of gas, the
actual dollar cost for that transportation
is less than 10%.
In contrast, it is much less efficient to
transport natural gas in this way. Natural
gas has to be cooled to liquefy it to form
LNG before it goes into the tank. That in
itself takes a lot of energy. The LNG
tanker is more expensive, resulting in
much higher transportation costs, and it
takes more energy to re-gasify and com-
press the gas for storage, pipeline trans-
portation, and use when it reaches its
destination. We are going to find out
exactly how high these costs will be as
time goes on, since most of our natural
gas will eventually have to be imported.
Transporting liquid hydrogen would be
vastly more expensive.
Energy as Energy
How, then, around the year 2050, are
we going to transport energy over vast
distances while minimizing the costs and
getting the amount of power we need?
The best answer would be to transport
energy as energy, not as mass. Instead of
storing energy in some chemical form,
keep it as pure energy. There are essential-
ly only two ways to do that. We could
microwave energy up to a satellite and
bounce it back down, or we could run it
along wires on the earths surface. We will
do both, but mostly we will use wires.
Enabling the Grid: Local Energy Storage
With this energy distribution model,
the entire North American continent, all
the way from the Arctic Circle down to
Panama, would be wired together in a
giant interconnected electrical energy
grid. Indeed, we are already very close to
that now, except that in the new grid, by
the middle of the century, there would be
two critical additions. The first would be
local energy storage. Every one of the
hundred million or so sites consuming
energy in this grid would have its own
storage unitthe equivalent of an unin-
terruptible power supply that not only
gives a home computer a few minutes of
power during an outage, but also can
supply each of our houses or businesses
with 1224 hours of full operation.
Imagine that by mid-century, nano-
technologies, new materials, and possibly
new physics will have enabled us to cre-
ate local storage units for electrical energy
that are not much bigger than this lectern.
The units would store 100 kilowatt-hours,
which is enough to run a normal house
for 24 hours. If we tried to run this type of
unit right now using a lead acid battery,
the unit would have to be about 20 times
this volumethe size of a small room.
The cost would be around $10,000. I
believe that if we really put our minds to
it, we could think of a way to shrink the
unit volume significantly and drop the
cost dramatically. There must be many
technologies that would fit inside this
box and store that amount of energy.
On the other hand, if we think about
storing energy on a much larger scale
say, that of a big power plant that pro-
duces a gigawatt of powerthe possibili-
ties are very limited. We could pump
water uphill and run it back down again
(if we had the water and the land), or we
could compress air (if we had large cav-
erns to store it in). Large-scale energy stor-
age technologies do exist, but, except in
special locations, they lack the practicality
and desirability of small-scale storage.
Commercializing Local Energy Storage
I believe that creating an efficient local
storage solution should be one of our
prime energy targets. Let us develop
what effectively would be a new major-
appliance industry. Since our proposed
unit is very small, it could be easily mar-
keted to each one of those hundred mil-
lion or so energy customers who are seek-
ing local storage. Since the unit would
have to be inexpensivea few thousand
dollars at mostcustomers who were not
satisfied could replace their units or trade
up to a better model, as they do now with
other technical products such as comput-
ers. It would be a way to PC this critical
aspect of the energy industry. Every five
years or so, on average, customers would
opt to upgrade their storage unit, based
on local economic incentives and newly
available product improvements driven
by free markets and entrepreneurship.
Inventive minds would be continually
evolving the best possible answer to what
fits inside this box.
Then, every one of those sites in the
electrical energy grid would be able to use
one of these units to buffer the grids ener-
gy fluctuations. Real-time pricing for indi-
vidual electrical power usage would give
each customer the incentive to buy a unit
that could absorb the power needed to
generate 100 kilowatt-hours of electricity
in the six-hour time period when energy is
cheapest on the grid. People who needed
more than 100 kilowatt-hours of power or
needed virtually trouble-free energy for
longer periods could simply buy addition-
al or larger units. That would be the cus-
tomers decision.
Basically, this local unit would solve
the energy storage problem. With that
solved, it would now be possible to get
most of the energy on the grid from
unreliable or episodic sources, like
wind or solar. Without a local storage
solution, however, we could not rely on
these other energy sources to supply
large amounts of energy on the grid, at
least not at levels above 1020%. Above
those levels, we would need to have all
the reserves in place, ready to provide
electrical power when the sun stopped
shining or the wind stopped blowing.
Local energy storage would get us past
that problem and give us an extremely
robust, terrorist-resistant, delocalized
electrical energy system.
Completing the Grid: High-Voltage
Transmission Lines
In addition to a local system, one other
innovation is needed on the grid to make it
work. We need the capability to transport
electrical power in hundreds of gigawatts
over thousands of miles. High-voltage
transmission lines would be very efficient
for this purpose. In fact, we already have
dc lines that carry electricity for 1500 miles
There has been a lot of talk about
the hydrogen economy, which I
believe is, despite its virtues,
likely to remain a distraction from
the real, practical solutions to
our energy needs.
MATERIAL MATTERS
MRS BULLETIN VOLUME 30 JUNE 2005 417
with fairly low loss. They carry only about
1 gigawatt, or 1000 megawatts, however,
not the 100 gigawatts we need. If, through
new technology, we could figure out how
to transport electricity over wires that
would deliver power thousands of miles
away from where it is generated, and do
that for several pennies per extra premium,
we could make the whole North American
continent energy self-sufficient.
Everybody Gets to Play
That goal is not as impossible as it
might seem. There are places on this conti-
nent that experience extremely intense
solar radiation that is very reliable. There
are also highly remote places that most
people would not object to as sites for
nuclear power plantsplaces that would
not be in anybodys backyard. Today,
most people are not even aware of what
fraction of their electrical power comes
from a nuclear plant, or where that plant is
located. They would be even less aware if
the facility were out in, say, Hanford,
Washington, my favorite place to put
nuclear power plants. So, combining long-
distance electrical power transmission
with efficient local electrical storage gives
us access to energy produced by any new
technologies, as well as any existing
power plants regardless of their technolo-
gy or precise location. In the brave new
energy era, everybody gets to play.
Conclusion
Innovations in nanotechnology and
other advances in materials science
would make it possible to transform our
vision of plentiful, low-cost energy into a
reality. By developing new technologies,
marshaling the excellent resources of
organizations like the Materials Research
Society, and developing the talents of a
new generation of scientists and engi-
neers, I believe that we can solve even
our most critical energy problems.
FOR FURTHER READING: David Goodstein,
Out of Gas: The End of the Age of Oil (W.W.
Norton & Co., New York, 2004); Paul
Roberts, The End of Oil: On the Edge of a
Perilous New World (Houghton Mifflin,
New York, 2004); Daniel Yergin, The Prize:
The Epic Quest for Oil, Money, & Power (Free
Press, New York, 1991); Kenneth S.
Deffeyes, Hubberts Peak: The Impending
World Oil Shortage (Princeton University
Press, Princeton, N.J., 2001); Matthew R.
Simmons, Simmons & Company Interna-
tional, www.simmonsco-intl.com (ac-
cessed April 2005); Association for the
Study of Peak Oil & Gas, www.peakoil.net
(accessed April 2005); Gal Luft, Institute for
the Analysis of Global Security, www.iags.
org (accessed April 2005); Amory Lovins,
Rocky Mountain Institute, www.rmi.org
(accessed April 2005); M.I. Hoffert et al.,
Science 298 (November 1, 2002) p. 981; and
Basic Research Needs for the Hydrogen
Economy: Report of the Basic Energy
Sciences Workshop on Hydrogen
Production, Storage, and Use, May 1315,
2003, www.sc.doe.gov/bes/hydrogen.
pdf (accessed April 2005).
Richard E. Smalley is the 1996 Nobel
Laureate in chemistry and a University
Professor and professor of chemistry and
physics at Rice University. He received his
BS degree in 1965 from the University of
Michigan. After a four-year period as a
research chemist with Shell Chemical
Company, he earned a masters degree in
1971 and his PhD degree in 1973 from
Princeton University. At Rice University, he
rose rapidly through the academic ranks,
being named to the Gene and Norman
Hackerman Chair in Chemistry in 1982.
Smalley was a founder of the Quantum
Institute in 1979 and served as chair from
1986 to 1996. In 1990, he became a professor
in the Department of Physics and was
appointed University Professor in 2002.
Smalley was the founding director of the
Center for Nanoscale Science and Technology
at Rice in 1996 and is now director of the uni-
versitys Carbon Nanotechnology Laboratory.
Among Smalleys other awards and honors
are election to the National Academy of
Sciences (1990) and to the American Acad-
emy of Arts and Sciences (1991), the Inter-
national Prize for New Materials (1992), the
E.O. Lawrence Award of the U.S. Depart-
ment of Energy (1992), the Franklin Medal
(1996), the Distinguished Public Service
Medal from the U.S. Department of the Navy
(1997), the Glenn T. Seaborg Medal of the
State of Texas (2002), and the Lifetime
Achievement Award from Small Times
Magazine (2003).
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